Fire!

About once a week I come home from work and say to Shizuko, "that was the worst day of my life." And so far it has been true,--a constant, descending spiral of pain and humiliation that is my job. Every worst day worse than the one before. Now however I think I have bottomed out. It is going to take some time to top the fire.

I am a little embarrassed to tell the following story　because it reflects badly on me in so many different ways, but I console myself with the knowledge that your opinion of me was surely destroyed years ago.

It is time for graduating seniors in our university to turn in their graduation thesis. In the past, I think I have described these theses as poorly punctuated random thoughts in English on broad topics, and I believe that this description still stands. Before the Christmas/New year break, a student, Miwako (her real name), sent as an e-mail attachment her thesis for me to proofread and correct. She had been working steadily during the semester to complete the paper and had now reached the required 20-page limit and so stopped in mid-random thought and sentence. She is a diligent, but not terribly accurate writer. The paper was basically comprehensible to a sympathetic reader, but in reality every sentence of the 20 pages contained errors and needed correcting. I did this directly on the paper using the word-processor and sent it back to her by e-mail. The next day, just before the break I met Miwako and another student, Sayuri. I told Sayuri that her paper was fine and if she made the few corrections I indicated, the paper would be ready for submission. I told Miwako, with a straight face, that her paper was very good, but I wanted to read it one more time to make sure I had caught all the errors. I could tell she was heartbroken. So I tried to console her, but just continued digging the hole, saying something about how while Miwako's paper, was really, very good, it probably suffered, however slightly, in comparison to Sayuri's paper which was excellent. Neither of which were true. Tears were welling up in her eyes when I hurriedly promised Miwako to read her paper once more during the break and return it to her in January. I did that. And was pleasantly surprised to see that I had caught most of the errors the first time and really with just a few more fixes the paper would be ready.

To put an end to this shaggy dog story, I sent Miwako an e-mail saying come to my office. I received in return, just before the submission deadline, an e-mail with an attachment. During vacation she had re-written her pages now up to 23 pages, changing every sentence of my correct and corrected English into gibberish. I was heartbroken.

She showed up at my office on the day her senior thesis was due. She looked terrible, puffy, red bloodshot eyes. She obviously had not slept. She had stayed up for two days writing gibberish. She was mentally and physically exhausted so when I told her that her effort had been a complete waste of time (not in so many words, mind you) because the paper I had proofread was better, and better written.

The deadline was that day and I had no time to proofread her paper and it was full of mistakes. So she would be better off handing in the proofread paper. She started to cry, bawl, blubber. So I said, "Let's have a cup of tea." Very few situations can't be improved by a hot cup of tea.

In my office I have a gas burner for making tea. Above the burner is a rack for towels. I have often thought this was dangerous, but have always been careful to make sure none of the towels got close enough to the flame to catch. Miwa was still sobbing away so I was a distracted. I was digging around looking to see if I had any chocolate, when I heard something crackling. I thought the water could not be boiling already, and it was not. One of the towels had slipped down and caught fire. On the rack there were two or three towels, old and dried out. They caught like tinder and there was a pretty good flame going. I beat it out quickly, burning my hands pretty good in the process. The fire was out, but all the smoke had set off the fire alarm and everyone came running to my office. I told them a towel had caught fire and everyone just laughed it off, but it had been pretty bad. Three old towels can make a pretty big fire. The cabinet is pretty scorched and if it had caught, it would have been GAME OVER. Oh well, what they don't know won't cost me my job. The day did not get much better after that, but it certainly did not get worse.